Slamcore, a developer of spatial intelligence software, has announced a $14 million funding round from top investors, including ROKStar Ventures, a subsidiary of Rockwell Automation, one of the world’s largest industrial automation and digital transformation companies.
The round brings Slamcore’s total funding to $40 million, with backing from investors including Toyota Ventures, Interwoven Ventures, MMC Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners and IP Group.
The investment arrives as global industrial operators face an urgent dual challenge: the need for productivity gains amid rising safety risks on factory and warehouse floors.
Despite significant investment in automation, many facilities remain digitally dark regarding their manual fleets.
According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, between 35,000 and 62,000 forklift-related injuries occur each year in the United States, resulting in an average of two fatalities every week.
This safety risk exists alongside significant inefficiency, with forklifts productive for less than half of their total operating time.
Despite heavy technology investment, most sites still lack real-time visibility into vehicle location and performance.
Slamcore has built the solution. Using a stereo camera and proprietary visual AI, Slamcore’s technology continuously tracks the position and behavior of any vehicle in a facility without GPS, beacons, floor markers or any other infrastructure.
Slamcore Aware gives operations managers facility-wide visibility of every vehicle, enabling smarter utilization, faster investigations and meaningful reductions in idle time.
Slamcore Alert monitors driver behavior and proximity to pedestrians and structures, catching the near misses before they become incidents.
Owen Nicholson, CEO, Slamcore, says: “Operations managers in factories and warehouses have largely been flying blind when it comes to their manual fleets. Slamcore Aware and Slamcore Alert change that from day one, without disruption to existing operations.
“ROKStar Ventures’ investment tells us that the industry’s most sophisticated players see this as a foundational infrastructure, not just another point solution.
“As our footprint grows, so does a body of real-world operational data that does not exist anywhere else and that will become the backbone for the next generation of physical AI.”
Ryan Gariepy, vice president of robotics at Rockwell Automation, says: “Delivering visual AI that performs reliably at the scale and complexity of a real factory or distribution center is a genuinely hard problem.
“Most approaches either require significant infrastructure investment or fail to hold up in the dynamic, unpredictable conditions of an active facility.
“The potential for the same technology platform to work on every class of autonomous and human-operated industrial vehicle is key.
“We’re also incredibly excited about their ability to scale without requiring complex and time-consuming vehicle or facility redesigns.”
Jim Adler, founder and general partner at Toyota Ventures and a Slamcore board member since the company’s earliest days, says: “At Toyota Ventures, we believe safety and efficiency go hand-in-hand. Slamcore Aware and Alert have proven this today, but their long-term potential is even more compelling.
“Each Slamcore deployment generates real-world operational data, which will train the next generation of physical AI models.”
